The year is 2454. Three centuries of peace and a hard-won golden age have come to an abrupt end.
The once steadfast leadership of the seven Hives – nations without fixed location – is soured by corruption, deception and insurgency. Savagery and bloodlust, three-centuries suppressed, have been unleashed.
The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world's stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held.
But that terrible secret is no longer hidden, the balance has tipped, the Hives' utopian façade has slipped. Just days ago, humanity stood at the pinnacle of civilization. Now everyone – Hives and Hiveless, Utopians and sensayers, emperors and convicts, warriors and saints – scrambles to prepare for the seemingly inevitable war.
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Review
“A breathless and devious intellectual page-turner, Seven Surrenders veers expertly between love, murder, mayhem, parenthood, theology, and high politics. I haven't had this much fun with a book in a long time.” ―Max Gladstone on Seven Surrenders
Praise for Book 1 of Terra Ignota, Too Like the Lightning
“Bold, furiously inventive, and mesmerizing…It’s the best science fiction novel I've read in a long while.” ―Robert Charles Wilson
“More intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall…If you read a debut novel this year, make it Too Like the Lightning.” ―Cory Doctorow
“Astonishingly dense, accomplished and well-realized, with a future that feels real in both its strangeness and its familiarity.”―RT Book Reviews (Top Pick)
About the Author
ADA PALMER is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. Her first nonfiction book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a capella music, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. Her personal site is at adapalmer.com, and she writes about history for a popular audience at exurbe.com and about SF and fantasy-related matters at Tor.com.
The third book of her Terra Ignota series, The Will to Battle, will be released December 2017.